Who are Donald Trump’s key allies in Europe?

Who are Donald Trump’s key allies in Europe?

Post By World Alternative for Germany, donald trump, Far right, Nigel Farage, Robert Fico , Viktor Orbán

From governments in Hungary and Slovakia to pro-Russian opposition parties, the former and possibly future US president has friends across the continent.

With the US election hanging in the balance, European leaders are psychologically preparing for another Donald Trump presidency — an event that would have major implications not just for trade and diplomacy, but for the collective security architecture that has kept much of Europe relatively peaceful since the end of World War II.

For now, Trump’s campaign has focused mainly on his domestic agenda, but his term in office carries lessons about how he will approach his country’s dealings with Europe.

He has also made clear whom he sees as his allies there: a constellation of right-wing heads of government and opposition figures, many of whom share his disdain for international institutions, multiculturalism, progressive social policy and free trade.

At the same time, political developments in various countries and regions, not least Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, mean that a new Trump administration would have new relationships to build and new problems to manage — or indeed wash its hands of.

Hungary’s Viktor Orbán

Trump and his circle have long been particularly impressed with Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán, who has enthusiastically promoted his version of “illiberal democracy” despite repeated clashes with the EU over the rule of law in his country.

Orbán is particularly notorious for indulging in conspiracy theories about alleged “globalist” meddling in domestic affairs, which he has used as a pretext for curtailing media and academic freedoms to a degree that puts him well outside the EU mainstream.

Many on the American right have explicitly celebrated Orbán’s leadership as a model for “saving” the US. These same legislators and commentators are also often criticised for their openness to the Kremlin’s point of view on Ukraine — such as that NATO and the West have no business opposing the full-scale Russian invasion of the country that began in early 2022.

Hungary may not be the largest European country, but it can exercise veto power in various EU institutions and in NATO, where Orbán joined with Turkey in holding up Sweden’s accession for several months.

Hungary also holds the rotating EU presidency until the end of this year, and Orbán has already used it to stir up arguments with the Commission and Parliament. He particularly infuriated mainstream leaders in Brussels by meeting Russian President Vladimir Putin in person this summer, and has exuberantly continued to pursue an idiosyncratic foreign policy that puts him at odds with many European capitals.

Orbán is, however, something of an outlier as far as EU leaders are concerned. There is no other long-established government to his right, and in Poland, one of the most important governments on his part of the ideological spectrum was voted out almost a year ago.

One place trending his way is Slovakia, where right-wing Prime Minister Robert Fico swept back to power in 2023. Fico, who like Trump recently survived an assassination attempt, has an anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-immigration tilt, and like Orbán has been cracking down on his country’s free media. He is also far warmer towards Putin than most European leaders.

Italy: Georgia Meloni

One of the more mainstream potential allies for Trump is Giorgia Meloni, prime minister of Italy.

Currently the most right-wing leader in the G7 — with the possible exception of Japanese PM Fumio Kishida — she has worked hard to cultivate relationships with the international right.

But she has also successfully avoided acquiring an Orbán-style stigma among the EU’s centrists despite her culturally conservative and nationalistic views, and despite the fact that her coalition government includes the aggressively anti-immigration Lega party.

Should Trump be re-elected, Meloni will have a natural ideological ally in power across the Atlantic. And should she prove as adept at building a relationship with his administration as she has with other governments, she could prove to be something of a bridge between a new Trump administration and an EU whose priorities could be seriously frustrated by his likely agenda.

Europe’s radical right

Where Trump will find his most devoted European supporters, however, is among the hardline and extreme right, most of whom are either in opposition or influencing public opinion from outside elected politics.

Several well-known parties like Spain’s Vox, France’s National Rally, Alternative for Germany (AfD) and Reform UK have so far failed to make it into national government but have made major advances in the last decade, growing their numbers in national parliaments and in AfD’s case, winning the largest share of the vote in a recent regional election.

Like Trump, these parties tend to oppose mass immigration, particularly from poorer and predominantly Muslim countries. They often share a scepticism toward NATO, the EU and other international institutions, and they generally appeal to socially conservative voters with a traditional sense of national identity while also emphasising how “the system” — global or national — has left “their” voters behind.

More than that, some of their leaders have directly associated themselves with Trump and his US allies. This is especially true of Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, who won a seat in parliament for the first time this year. He has appeared at numerous Trump events and given many interviews to right-wing US outlets.

However, predictions that this political tendency could gain hegemony in European politics have so far proven wide of the mark. Farage’s party only has a handful of MPs and no sway over the current government, while the National Rally fell short of their own expectations in this summer’s French election.

And even though the AfD is polling ahead of the parties in Germany’s ruling coalition, it is also under the scrutiny of the security services because of its alleged links with far-right extremism.

At the EU level, the parliamentary elections held in June this year did not see the across-the-board populist and far-right surge many observers had expected, paving the way for the centre-right and internationalist Ursula von der Leyen to secure another term as president of the commission.

This means that if re-elected, Trump will be dealing with a Europe whose major leaders are, for the most part, not amenable to his norm-defying, sovereignty-first political style.

Instead, the EU and most other European countries are likely to continue down a pro-Ukraine multilateralist road — and if anything, the implications of a second Trump presidency for the US’ international presence are an incentive for the centre to hold.

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#Donald #Trumps #key #allies #Europe

How Britain voted: Charts and maps

Post By Politics British politics, Elections, Elections in Europe, Far right, keir starmer, Nigel Farage, rishi sunak, U.K. election 2024, United Kingdom

The U.K. Labour party is celebrating a landslide victory.

Keir Starmer’s party has 411 seats, excluding the speaker’s, and a large majority in the House of Commons. His tally includes a number of “red wall” constituencies the party lost to the Conservatives in the previous election in 2019, and seats the Scottish National Party had dominated for nearly a decade.

But a closer look at the numbers suggests Labour strategists should not rest on their laurels.

Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party won five seats, but placed second in more than 100 other constituencies. By vote share, it is now the U.K.’s third-largest party.

Those same vote shares paint a far weaker picture for Labour than its seat number would suggest. The party recorded a 200-seat jump — but its vote share advanced by only an inch.

UK legislative election results

2019
2024

The Conservatives lost 250 seats, as their vote share plummeted from more than 40 percent in 2019 to below 25 percent now.

But both Labour and the Liberal Democrats recorded major seat gains despite barely making any advance at all in their vote shares.

The U.K.’s first-past-the-post election system means Labour will occupy about 60 percent of the House of Commons, with less than 35 percent of the votes. That vote share is less than former leader Jeremy Corbyn achieved in 2017, when he lost to Theresa May’s Conservatives.

Meanwhile, Nigel Farage’s Reform UK won five seats — but collected more than 14 percent of the vote, making it the third-largest party by vote share, ahead of the Liberal Democrats.

Labour’s anticipated win, while an extraordinary turnaround for a party that didn’t look electable just a few years ago, doesn’t appear to have enthused voters.

With turnout estimated at 60 percent, no election in the past 20 years drew fewer voters to the ballot box.

`Still, Labour made huge strides in the U.K.’s embattled swing seats.

Those constituencies were held by the Conservatives until 1997, before flipping to Labour and then back to the Tories from 2010.

Most of them have now swung behind Labour once more.

Labour’s loss in 2019 was punctuated by the crumbling of the “red wall,” as strongholds stretching from the Midlands to the north of England voted in a Conservative MP, many for the first time.

But that Tory control in these seats proved short-lived…

The Conservatives have had a terrible 2024 election, but so has the Scottish National Party.

The SNP has had a firm grip on power in Scotland since 2015, when it won nearly every Scottish seat — most of which had been occupied by Labour before.

But Thursday’s vote put an end to its winning streak. The party have lost around 80 percent of the seats total they held in 2019, with most going to Labour.

This election has radically changed the UK’s electoral map: a sea of red reminiscent of 1997 has the Conservative party reeling; a few dots of bright light blue and a significant vote share mark Reform UK’s entrance to mainstream UK politics, and the Lib Dems can enjoy a return from relative obscurity with more than 70 MPs, its highest number ever. Meanwhile, the shockingly poor performance of the SNP marks the end of an era north of the border.

*These figures have been updated following the last contituency’s declaration

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#Britain #voted #Charts #maps

Just how extreme is Nigel Farage’s Reform UK?

Post By World British politics, Far right, Nigel Farage, UK elections 2024, United Kingdom

A string of embarrassments involving under-vetted candidates has raised red flags about an insurgent force in the UK election, led by Brexit activist and former MEP Nigel Farage.

With just two weeks to go until a snap general election, Britain’s ruling Conservative Party looks set to face what could be its biggest defeat in more than a century.

While the Labour Party is expected to win a landslide victory, much of the credit for the Conservatives’ downfall will be due to an insurgent party to their right.

According to the polls, the anti-immigration, anti-”woke” and culturally traditionalist party Reform UK, led by leading Brexit activist and former MEP Nigel Farage, is set to take as much as 15% or more of the national vote. One poll that showed it leading the Tories by a single point received wall-to-wall coverage, though the lead was within the margin of error.

Farage himself is now running to become an MP for the seat of Clacton, an area that has received national attention mainly for its voters’ intensely pro-Brexit views and its atmosphere of economic depression.

It will be Farage’s eighth attempt to get into parliament, and for the first time, he is widely expected to win.

So who are the voters he is trying to win over?

Reform’s pitch appears squarely aimed at a stereotypical older right-wing voter — but according to Paula Surridge, Professor of Political Sociology at the University of Bristol, the slice of the electorate currently backing the party straddles the left-right divide more than many commentators acknowledge.

“The voters Reform have been winning from the Conservatives are most distinctive in terms of having immigration as their core concern,” she told Euronews. “They are particularly hardline on illegal immigration and the ‘small boats’.”

“In terms of values they are a little more socially conservative than those who have been staying loyal to the Conservatives, but notably more economically left-leaning — something a little out of tune with the party rhetoric and manifesto.”

That manifesto, branded by Reform as a “Contract with You”, is heavily focused on trying to cut taxes and turbo-charge economic growth.

It contains various measures that appear designed to appeal to wealthier voters, among them an extravagant commitment to lift the inheritance tax threshold so that estates worth less than £2 million (€2.36m) are exempted.

The fiscal element of the so-called contract was shredded in an analysis by the independent Institute of Fiscal Studies, which concluded that “even with the extremely optimistic assumptions about how much economic growth would increase, the sums in this manifesto do not add up.”

‘Reclaiming Britain’: All-out culture war assault

But if these plans sit at odds with many potential Reform voters’ economic views, the manifesto’s other policies are a laundry list of the hardline right’s favourite topics.

Aside from a strident plan to freeze non-essential immigration and impose a punitive levy on businesses that employ “foreign workers”, the contract also pushes for the end of what it calls “woke policing” and a philosophical cleanup of British education.

It would force schools to “ban transgender ideology” while enforcing a “patriotic” model of education, declaring that “any teaching about a period or example of British or European imperialism or slavery must be paired with the teaching of a non-European occurrence of the same to ensure balance.”

The national identity theme even gets its own full page, titled “Reclaiming Britain”, a section that nods towards post-COVID-19 paranoia about the World Health Organization, the World Economic Forum, and the declining use of cash currency.

Alongside proposing two new national holidays to celebrate Welsh and English identity, the manifesto declares it would launch an all-out culture war assault.

“Legislate to stop left-wing bias and politically correct ideology that threatens personal freedom and democracy,” it reads. “No more de-banking, cancel culture, left wing hate mobs or political bias in public institutions. Stop Sharia law being used in the UK.” (Sharia law is not used in the British legal system.)

This, then, is what the party says it wants. But just as telling are the people it has chosen to represent it.

Into the fray, beyond the fringe

Many of Reform UK’s 600-plus candidates were selected in a rush when the snap election was called by Rishi Sunak. This left the party with little time to vet them for problematic past statements, and the results have not been good.

One candidate, Ian Gribbin, was forced to apologise after the resurfacing of old posts on a right-wing news site in which he wrote that it would have been “far better” for the UK to have stayed out of World War II.

“Britain would be in a far better state today had we taken Hitler up on his offer of neutrality … but oh no, Britain’s warped mindset values weird notions of international morality rather than looking after its own people,” one of the posts read.

He also referred to women as the “sponging gender” and suggested they should be deprived of medical care until the life expectancy gap between the sexes could be closed. He remains Reform UK’s candidate for the seat of Bexhill and Battle.

Another candidate, Jack Aaron, has had to defend comments in which he described Hitler as a “brilliant” man according to “Socionics”, a fringe pseudoscientific theory of personality types. Again, he remains a candidate.

One Reform candidate who has actually stood down is Grant StClair-Armstrong, who, it was revealed, had previously urged readers to vote for the openly racist British National Party.

Apologising for his comments, which Reform itself condemned as “unacceptable”, StClair-Amstrong was insistent that: “I am not a racist in any shape or form, outspoken maybe. I have many Muslim friends, three of whom refer to me as Daddy.” Politico reported that he did not appear to be discussing his children.

Farage and his de facto co-leader, Richard Tice, have blamed these incidents on the supposed failures of a third-party vetting contractor, against whom they say they are considering legal action. However, it has transpired that the party, in fact, used Vetting.com, which is not a vetting agency but an automated paid-for platform to which users can upload information themselves.

Nonetheless, Farage has suggested an establishment “stitch-up” may be to blame.

But aside from the plethora of candidates that Reform insists it did not have time to vet properly, there is the matter of what Farage himself has said since the campaign began.

When Prime Minister Rishi Sunak left a D-Day commemoration ceremony early, shocking his allies and outraging much of the nation, Farage used an interview to complain that the UK’s first premier of Asian descent “doesn’t understand our history and our culture”.

Called out for his remarks on air by a BBC interviewer, Farage insisted his point was that Sunak is “utterly disconnected by class, by privilege, from how the ordinary folk in this country feel”.

Farage as the wrecking ball (again)

The extent to which all of this matters depends largely on the result Reform get on 4 July — and on what Farage does next.

According to the polls, Reform is set to take as much as 15% or more of the national vote. One poll that showed it leading the Tories by a single point received wall-to-wall coverage, but the lead was within the survey’s margin of error.

Yet this polling surge may not directly translate into any meaningful number of seats.

Under the UK’s first-past-the-post electoral system, a party’s national share of the vote is essentially irrelevant. Instead, each seat is represented by the candidate who wins the most votes within the constituency, however small their share might be.

This does not seem to bother Farage, who originally claimed he was not planning to run at all. His entrance into the fray has boosted his party, and he is increasingly open about his goal of destroying the Conservative Party in its current form.

Depending on how reduced that party is in size after 4 July and who leads it into its years out of power, he may yet be admitted to its ranks himself.

And if he makes it through to a leadership contest, the grassroots party members who make the final decision might well give him a chance to run the show.

Euronews contacted Reform UK for comment, but the party did not respond at the time of publication.

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Reform UK: The right-wing party that could transform British politics

Post By World British politics, Euroscepticism, Far right, Immigration, Nigel Farage

Having attracted its first MP in the form of a Tory defector, the former Brexit Party is catching up with the government in the polls.

Most western European countries have at least one major radical right-wing party either in government or close to it.

Italy’s government is run by the Brothers of Italy and Lega; the Finns Party remains part of Finland’s coalition government, the Sweden Democrats are in a confidence-and-supply deal with a mainstream right-wing coalition in Stockholm, and Germany’s AfD, France’s National Rally and Spain’s Vox all carry serious electoral weight – even if their chances of actually leading national governments remain slim for now.

Thanks in part to its electoral system, the UK has not yet seen a party like this make major gains at the ballot box outside of previous EU Parliament elections. But with the ruling Conservative Party unable to close a 20-plus-point polling deficit against the Labour Party, that could be about to change.

With a general election set for sometime this year, Reform UK, the rebranded version of Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party, is rapidly catching up with the governing Conservative Party in the polls. It currently has only one MP: Lee Anderson, who defected from the Tories after falsely claiming the Muslim mayor of London was controlled by Islamists.

Reform’s ideology has much in common with Europe’s radical right in general. As stated by its leader Richard Tice, it emphasises “traditional” values, including “pride in British history/culture” and law and order, while rejecting mass immigration, environmentalism, trans inclusivity, and “Islamic extremists on our streets”.

While its national polling numbers currently put it at 10-15%, a level that does not guarantee it will even win seats in parliament, Reform seems to be pulling voters away from the Conservatives at a time when they simply cannot afford to lose them.

Right and wrong

Reform has repeatedly and vehemently insisted it is not a “far right” party, and has threatened legal action against media organisations that label it as such.

Yet according to Dr Katy Brown of Ireland’s Maynooth University, there are undeniable similarities between Reform and its counterparts across the English Channel.

“Reform shares a number of ideological and policy positions with established far-right parties in Europe,” she says, “for example proposing net-zero immigration, adopting trans-exclusionary definitions of gender, and claiming to fight so-called ‘woke’ ideology.

“This places them much in line with parties like the Lega and National Rally, so it’s clear that such comparisons are not only warranted but also important in highlighting the exclusionary politics on which the party is based.”

The “far right” label has also been rejected by European parties that are far more openly radical than Reform. National Rally has its roots in the old French right, dating back to apologists for the Vichy collaborationist regime and the Algerian war of independence. The Finns count defenders of the Nazis among their ranks, while Vox has been frequently accused of nostalgia for the fascist regime of Francisco Franco.

Over the line

Reform’s stated policies aside, some of its candidates have also espoused extreme views in public.

On the one hand, Tice spoke out sternly after a major Tory donor was reported to have made viciously racist and sexist remarks about a black Labour MP, Diane Abbott. The Tories were slow to condemn his comments, and were widely criticised for their hesitancy.

And while the Tories did ultimately cut Anderson loose, many of their current MPs and candidates have pushed into the realm of conspiracy theory – with former prime minister Liz Truss increasingly associating with extremists on the American right.

However, Reform’s hands are hardly clean on this front.

Besides Anderson’s unfounded claim that the Muslim mayor of London was in the pocket of Islamists – which he made before Reform welcomed him – there is the example of Ginny H Ball, whom Reform dropped as a parliamentary candidate after she made a litany of racist statements.

Another candidate was dropped after referring to Scotland as “a turd that won’t flush”.

Expert Brown, whose academic work focuses on the mainstreaming of extremist and radical ideas in European politics, cautions that Reform’s insistence it isn’t a far right party should not be taken at face value. Instead, she adds, we need to think about why it and other parties are so keen to reject these labels.

“It is a common strategy for parties to attempt to seem more acceptable by overtly distancing themselves from supposedly more extreme examples,” she explains. “It is crucial that we challenge these self-characterisations – else we risk allowing them to set the agenda for how they are defined and perceived, which can ultimately facilitate their normalisation.”

The future

But political normalisation aside, the deciding factor in Reform’s future may be its leadership.

In its days as the Brexit Party, Reform was led by the right-wing anti-immigration politician Nigel Farage, who previously helmed the UK’s top Eurosceptic party, UKIP. That party performed well in European Parliament elections but never made much headway at Westminster level, and Farage ultimately abandoned it.

With him gone, UKIP shrank dramatically while welcoming figures from the extreme racist fringe. Meanwhile, Farage helped create the Brexit Party, which made a big impact in the 2019 European Parliament elections.

But when it came time to fight the British general election in 2019, Farage agreed to stand aside for Boris Johnson’s Conservatives in most seats, giving the government a clear path to re-election on the campaign slogan “Get Brexit Done”.

Farage then left the party’s leadership, where he has been succeeded by the far more obscure Tice. But according to some polls, if he were to take the leadership, he might immediately give Reform an instant bump, and possibly even pull ahead of the Tories.

That almost certainly would not give Farage a path to government – but it would once again make him too loud a voice for mainstream British politicians to ignore.

Euronews has approached Reform for comment.

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#Reform #rightwing #party #transform #British #politics

Happy Rishiversary! Highs and lows of Rishi Sunak’s first year in power

Post By Politics Austerity, Boris Johnson, Brexit, Budget, Elections, Jeremy Hunt, Liz Truss, Nadhim Zahawi, Nigel Farage, Northern Ireland, Parliament, Policy, Poll, rishi sunak, Sadiq Khan, United Kingdom

LONDON — Happy anniversary to one of the UK’s most talked-about couples: No. 10 Downing Street and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.

It’s been a tumultuous love affair, with a will-they-won’t-they start — and enough bumps in the road to keep a local pothole repair team busy.

As Sunak tries to restore the reputation of his governing Tories — still languishing in the polls ahead of an expected election next year — POLITICO takes a trip down memory lane with a month-by-month rundown of some of the key highlights. Buckle up!

October 2022

It finally happened. After one failed leadership run — in which he lost to Liz Truss and, in a way, to a lettuce — Sunak was elected the new leader of the Conservatives on October 24, 2022.

A day later he became prime minister, and vowed his government would be marked by “integrity, professionalism and accountability at every level.” That was in no way a massive sub-tweet of Boris Johnson.

Sunak’s first port of call was to pick his cabinet. He took a slow and steady approach, which No. 10 insisted was “not indecisiveness” — even as some MPs, accustomed to the adrenalin of the Truss and Johnson administrations, found the wait tedious. Sunak’s first few days seemed to mark him out as a PM in control.

Success rating: 9/10. Congrats, Rishi!

November 2022

November saw a scrap about the COP climate summit. Having initially said he wouldn’t attend the COP27 bash, Sunak caved and traveled to Egypt for the conference on November 7, insisting he absolutely loved the planet.

Later in the month, Sunak had the fun task of creating a new government budget with Chancellor Jeremy Hunt, seeking to right the economic ship after the drama of Truss’ brief spell in office.

The cheery document, billed in some quarters as Austerity 2.0 but actually delaying a lot of pain until after the next general election, unveiled a £55 billion package of tax increases and spending cuts, an attempt to ensure that Britain’s economic downturn was “shallower, and hurts people less,” according to Hunt. Something for the bumper sticker!

Its key measures indeed survived contact with the House of Commons and, crucially, didn’t spook the markets.

Success rating: 7/10. COP kerfuffle notwithstanding, Sunak and Hunt could breathe a sigh of relief for a whole eight seconds.

December 2022

Calling it a “winter of discontent” would be lazy plagiarism. So let’s go with “winter of discontent 2.0.”

A whopping 843,000 working days were lost in December to strikes, according to Britain’s statistics authority — the highest since those revolutionary days of November 2011.

With nurses, train drivers, and postal workers all downing tools (or mail?) throughout December, Sunak had a huge problem on his hands, and it didn’t get sorted until some time later. Despite the British love of moaning about train delays, the public largely supported the striking workers — especially the nurses.

Success rating: 3/10. ‘Tis the season of goodwill.

January 2023

It was a month of ups and downs for Sunak, who gave some … mixed messages on following the rules.

Sunak swiftly fired his embattled Conservative Party chairman Nadhim Zahawi after an independent probe found that Zahawi had not been sufficiently transparent about his private dealings with Britain’s tax authorities.

In a letter to Zahawi confirming his sacking, Sunak reminded us all he had vowed to put “integrity, professionalism, and accountability at every level” of his administration.

This is the same dude who started the month by … getting fined by police for not wearing a seatbelt.

Success rating: 5/10. Big boys wear their seatbelts.

February 2023

Sunak seemed strapped in this month, and it ended up being a pretty good one for the prime minister, who finally managed to reach a deal with the EU over contentious post-Brexit trade rules for Northern Ireland.

Sounding like a proud father at a press conference in Windsor, Sunak said Britain and the EU “may have had our differences in the past, but we are allies, trading partners and friends,” and hailed “a new chapter in our relationship.” A promised rebellion by allies of Sunak’s old nemesis Boris Johnson later came to nothing, which definitely didn’t provide Sunak with a good old chuckle.

Success rating: 10/10. Sunak managed the previously unthinkable: moving post-Brexit policy forward without loads of kicking and screaming from the Conservative Party. Plenty of time for that later!

March 2023

March saw the U.K. build on its much-heralded AUKUS pact with Australia and the U.S., with Sunak joining President Joe Biden and Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese at a submarine base in California to hail a new defense mega-deal between the three nations. It marked another win for Sunak’s plan to repair Britain’s battered image abroad and create jobs along the way.

Closer to home, however, the PM had some proper first-world problems brewing.

As voters grappled with ever-rising energy costs, the Guardian revealed that the mega-rich leader’s swimming pool in his Yorkshire home used so much energy that the local electricity grid had to be upgraded.

Such everyman woes provided a great backdrop for another government budget. Chancellor Hunt had them cheering from the rafters across the U.K. as he declared that the country would duck a technical recession this year.

Plans to help with the eye-watering cost of childcare and address Britain’s sluggish economic growth also featured prominently in another fiscal statement that may not have shifted many votes, but came off without major drama.

Success rating: Big deal and a big budget. Rishi, go have a swim to cool off. 7/10.

April 2023

April was — whisper it – a pretty quiet month, no small feat in British politics.

There was the small matter of an investigation being launched into a potential breach of the MP code of conduct by Sunak. It would be a whole four months, however, before that probe found he had indeed broken the rules, but only as a result of “confusion.” We’ve all been there.

Success rating: 5/10. A holding-pattern month.

May 2023

In May, Rishi faced his first big electoral test as prime minister: local elections. He didn’t do well, with the Conservatives losing over 1,000 seats, and both Labour and the Liberal Democrats making big gains.

Success rating: 2/10. Blame the voters!

June 2023

Still, nothing proves you’re confronting your problems at home like … heading to the other side of the Atlantic for a big visit to America. Sunak got his global mojo back on a trip that saw an unlikely bromance blossom between Sunak and Biden.

Biden pronounced the special relationship “in real good shape” — and even got Sunak’s name right this time (if not his job title.)

The rest of Sunak’s month was dominated by an angry row with Boris Johnson, who quit in a huff alongside a few allies after a damning report on his conduct in the Partygate affair. The row revealed how few acolytes Johnson still had in the parliament, and arguably strengthened Sunak’s position as the only game in town.

Success rating: 9/10. If it doesn’t work out here, Sunak could always make it big stateside.

July 2023

You can always count on a by-election or two to spice things up, and these were a mixed bag for Sunak. The prime minister’s Tories got a thumping in fights for the parliamentary seats of Selby and Ainsty, and Somerton and Frome.

There was one glimmer of hope, however: A narrow and unexpected win in Uxbridge, Johnson’s now-vacant seat, showed Team Sunak that targeted campaigning against environmental policies seen by some as overbearing could pay off.

Also in June, Sunak made a bold pay offer to striking public sector workers, and helped ease industrial tensions.

Success rating: 6/10. Few expected the Uxbridge result, even if Sunak’s fortunes elsewhere looked dicey.

August 2023

August saw grim headlines on what the government had billed as “small boats week” — a chance to show off all the hard work Sunak’s government was doing to stop asylum seekers crossing the English Channel in unsafe vessels.

As the week unfolded, disaster struck one element of the government’s tough asylum policy. A plan to move migrants onto the controversial Bibby Stockholm barge instead of putting them up in expensive hotel accommodation was derailed by concerns about legionella bacteria in the water supply. It was a PR headache for a government that hardly needed one.

On the brighter side, Sunak carried out a smooth and limited government reshuffle without anybody calling him mean names.

Success rating: 4/10. Nobody had “legionella” on the comms grid.

September 2023

Mr. Brexit Fix-it returned in September as a deal struck by Sunak ensured the U.K. successfully rejoined the EU’s Horizon multibillion-euro science funding scheme. It was another piece of unfinished Brexit business resolved, to the delight of top scientists and other massive nerds.

Sunak also seemed to land on a clear domestic dividing line in September. In a hastily-arranged Downing Street speech after his plans leaked, Sunak took a big red pen to parts of the government’s climate agenda, announcing a slowing of several key U.K. green policies.

A fierce backlash ensued from business groups, climate activists and some members of Sunak’s own Conservative Party.

But the PM’s supporters saw it as the first time Sunak had drawn bold lines in the sand ahead of the election, gambling that tapping into anxiety among motorists could see the Uxbridge trick repeated.

Success rating: 5/10. Nice Horizon deal, shame about the planet!

October 2023

The Conservative Party conference was dominated by … Liz Truss and trains.

Yep, the star of last year’s show made a triumphant comeback on the conference fringes, where she was greeted like a returning hero and urged Sunak to push for economic growth. Truss — plus Brexiteer-in-chief Nigel Farage, who swanned around the place — showed just how fractious the Tories remain, with plenty of Conservative leadership wannabes flaunting their wares.

The conference meanwhile saw endless speculation about whether Sunak would cancel a key part of a major high-speed rail link, an announcement he saved for his big speech at the close, a treat to the North of England, which famously hates useful transport links.

October would get grimmer still for Sunak, as two more by-election defeats suggested Labour really is on the comeback trail. There’s always November!

Success rating: 4/10. A month of Labour gains, trains and Nigel-mobiles.

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Tag: Nigel Farage